How to Find Profitable Keywords for Amazon Affiliate Sites

Amazon affiliate sites seem to be all the rage lately. It seems like everybody is building them. The popularity of Amazon product-based niche sites seemed to make itself apparent when Spencer Haws published his first public niche site project on his popular blog – Niche Pursuits. Ever since he shared his success with that public project – I’ve been seeing Amazon affiliate niche websites everywhere! The popularity of Amazon sites was proven even more to me recently when I launched my own keyword research service. Just during the beta test period, 60% of my customers wanted me to find keywords for them to build Amazon sites around. As a result, I’ve been doing a LOT of keyword research around topics that relate to products that are being sold on Amazon. In case you didn’t know – Amazon sells almost literally everything imaginable! In other words, there are limitless products being sold every day on Amazon and even more keywords that can lead to those products. Amazon is willing to pay out healthy commissions to their affiliates – which makes creating Amazon affiliate sites more and more attractive. Once you see how easy it is to find low competition keywords that lead to profitable Amazon niches – you’ll likely want to jump on the bandwagon too!

Using Data Provided to Find Seed Keywords

The first step when doing keyword research is to enter a seed keyword. Seed keywords can be literally anything. Some people like to just randomly brainstorm for seed keywords. Others will search the web to get ideas. I like to use data provided by Amazon to come up with seed keyword ideas.

Using Lists Generated by Amazon to Find Keywords

One strategy I’ve found very effective is to generate a list of products that come up under “Best Sellers” for certain categories and sub-categories within Amazon. From this list of products I look for ones that have at least 10 reviews (more is better) and have an average rating of at least 4 stars. I also look for products that sell for a decent price. I wouldn’t want to waste my time building out a site for a cheap product that would only pay me pennies in commission for each sale.

After finding a profitable product, I head over to Long Tail Pro and enter in whatever that product is as a seed keyword. I filter the results so that I see only keywords with at least 1,000 searches. From these results, I analyze the competition for only the keywords that look relevant to me. (This step is really quick and easy if you have the Platinum upgrade for Long Tail Pro.) For example, I might analyze the competition for keywords like:

best [product name]

top rated [product name]

[product name] reviews

cheap [product name]

All of these keywords are phrases that people type into Google when they are looking to buy something. These are the people we want to attract to our Amazon affiliate sites so that they end up on Amazon via one of our affiliate links!

Using Amazon’s Auto-fill Feature to Find Keywords

Another way to use data provided by Amazon is to hi-jack the auto-fill feature they have implemented in their search bar. Go ahead and try this. Head over to Amazon and type in a keyword like – karaoke machine. Hit space and then type the letter “a” and see what comes up in the auto-fill. Hit backspace and then try it again with the letter “b.” You could do this for the entire alphabet and get a ton of keyword ideas. You might be able to use something you find this way as a main keyword – or you could use some of these as seed keywords. The possibilities are endless!

How to Generate All of This Amazon Info the Easy Way

I’m sure there is a manual way to get all of this information for free. I admit – I’m too lazy to find out. I recently purchased a suite of tools that pulls all of this information in from Amazon and displays it in a nice workable and sortable format. I mean seriously – you would have to be crazy to actually go through the entire alphabet looking for auto-fill suggestions to come up with keyword ideas! I would never attempt that – but I found a piece of software that does it for you within seconds! Here is a link to the sales page for AmaSuite (affiliate link) – which includes the product that does this, along with a few other very useful products.

I purchased this suite of products just a few weeks ago and have been using it in conjunction with Long Tail Pro (Platinum) and have been coming up with some killer keyword research results! I recorded the following video to show you exactly what I mean. It took me maybe 10 minutes to find an awesome keyword using this strategy. A keyword that gets 2,400 monthly searches, is low in competition and has a bunch of relevant products for sale on Amazon that sell for a decent price. Check it out in the screenshot below and then watch the video to see exactly how I found it.

Hendrik – I wasn’t referring to the Google auto-complete within this post. The auto-complete or auto-fill in Amazon is what I am talking about. This is the data that is valuable for an Amazon site.

http://www.mymoneydesign.com/ MyMoneyDesign

I’ll definitely be using a few of these permutations for my next niche site project. I’ve made a commitment that the next site has got to be an Amazon one!

http://dumbpassiveincome.com/ Matthew Allen

It’s a whole different ball game, building an Amazon site MMD, as opposed to just building an Adsense site. Think of it as selling products rather than selling information. The cool thing is – there are limitless products available on Amazon. If you know what you’re doing, you can find some great keywords for Amazon niches!

Ray

hello, I’ve a quick question for you… It’s been almost one week since my last piece of content has been published (12 articles in total), and I started some basic blog commenting on relevant blogs a few days ago. All my pages got indexed, but my sites doesn’t rank for my main keyword. It ranks for other keywords, mostly long tail, but not at all for my main keyword. I don’t want to rank first overnight! I only want to know if my site is penalized or something like that. I’m using Serpfox to check rankings, but it ranks nowhere for my main keyword. (not even at 300+ positions)

Thanks

http://dumbpassiveincome.com/ Matthew Allen

Ray – without knowing the details, I could only guess why you’re not ranking. Since you’re commenting on an “Amazon” article, I’m assuming your site is an Amazon affiliate site. I don’t know why you’re not ranking, but my #1 guess would be that your main competition is mostly eCommerce sites. Are the current top 10 in Google mostly eCommerce sites that are closely related to your niche? If so, it will be difficult for you to rank for that keyword. For some reason, Google gives precedence to these types of sites – the ones that are actually selling the physical product. Even though their stats might not look impressive in whatever keyword research tool you are using – eCommerce sites seem to get some sort of “unfair” boost in the search engines.

I made this very mistake on a site that I put a LOT of work and money into recently… I’ve since moved on and chalked it up as another learning experience.

Nathan hibbs

I have found that as well, it can be hard to rank for the keyword when mostly ecommerce sites are present in the top 10 spots. By the way, nice post. I wrote down the keyword phrases for future use. When it comes to the ecommerce sites thing, I have found that when you really niche it down to a specific line within a product it helps a lot for rankings in google, bing, and yahoo, as long as you add value, which is hard for some topics.

Ollie

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Matthew,

I have had Amasuite since the first release. I have had LTP for about a year now, but I have never thought of using them together like this.

You have just given me a mega A-Ha moment.

Thank you again.

Its gonna be a long night.

Cheers!

http://dumbpassiveincome.com/ Matthew Allen

That is hilarious Ollie! When I watched the demo for AmaSuite, the first thing I thought of was using it in conjunction with LTP. Glad I could help you “see the light.”

http://www.seopumkin.com/ Ken

Thank Matthew, very useful info, i also doing the Amazon Affiliate and publish a post here for new affiliate, if anyone interest:

Great post! I’m an avid user of LTP but didn’t know Azon Suite, so thanks a lot for the great info!

I have one question for you: On your video, the keyword you found “karaoke machine for kids” doesn’t have the “best”, “top rated” or “reviews” words on it. Do you build niche sites around this type of keywords? Because, from what I’ve learned so far, users are not in “buying mode” when using them.

Once again, thanks for the great post (and site)! Bruno

http://dumbpassiveincome.com/ Matthew Allen

Hi Bruno – good question. I might build a niche site on a keyword like this. Totally depends on the niche. You are correct, this particular keyword doesn’t have those buyer terms attached to it. But think about it… Why would people be searching for this online if they weren’t looking to buy? Even if they are just looking for information, they probably are planning to buy one of these somewhere. It would be my job as a site creator to convince them to buy via my niche site.

Believe me – I have learned the hard way about building out a site where the searcher is probably just “window shopping.” I ended up realizing it after I spent far too much time and money on the site.

I did think this was a good example though. Besides – I’m not going to give away all of my “best” or “top rated” keywords! lol

Bruno

ahahah! I was hoping you would! lol

My question was just to find out if you had already tried it without the “buyer” words, and how it had turned out.

Anyway, you are right when you say that if people are searching for it, there is a possibility they might buy.

This would be great, as often the diference between (for example) “karaoke machine for kids” and “best karaoke machine for kids” is 2900 searches per month, to 480.

http://techcorp-hyip.com/ StefanDo

I lately read a topic about Amazon’s niche websites. But what is more interesting is that all this Amazon fashion could make someone very happy if he can handle to create a new product, sell it on amazon and just let others do the marketing.

On theory It is possible. On a practice I read for a couple selling stuffs for six figures a year.

http://formyourfuture.com/ Josh Escusa

I can’t buy asian kids from amazon? My dreams are ruined! Long tail pro is a great keyword tool. AmaSuite…eh… it depends what kind of site you’re going for, but I can see some benefits.

http://discountcommandos.com Discount Commandos

Thank Matt, Great Post…I will return to your site.

Matt

Just wish it also scraped sales rank. I don’t think sorting by the number of reviews is the best indicator of how well a product is currently selling. Those reviews could be years old.

http://www.livinginthailand.net/ Neale

I agree this would be an excellent add on more so as I reference “the 1st, third best selling etc”

http://www.livinginthailand.net/ Neale

Matt is it possible to upload a list of Asins into AmaSuite and get back data, price, ratings etc?

http://dumbpassiveincome.com/ Matthew Allen

I just looked Neale. I don’t think you can do that. There are 3 different software tools within AmaSuite, so I tried it in the Product Inspector tool. You can download a list of ASINs after you have created and filtered a list of products. But I don’t see an upload option. That really isn’t the point or the power behind this tool anyway. Good question though.

http://www.livinginthailand.net/ Neale

That’s a shame would have been an awesome thing to be able to pull current data on a set of Asins so easily I don’t know of any software that does it very easily I will suggest it to them.

http://dumbpassiveincome.com/ Matthew Allen

I’m still trying to figure out why you would want or need this feature Neale… Where are you getting these sets of ASINs that you want the info for?

http://www.livinginthailand.net/ Neale

It’s more about what you do with the Asins after you get them, for example in your content you may wish to say “This widget is currently reduced to just under $100 and is 30% cheaper than the other widget, the green widget has the best ratings of all widgets with 4.9 out of 5.0 and the red widget is the most popular with 777 reviews” if you can get the data and update your personal DB all the above variables can be coded into the content, this way your content stays fresh and is constantly updating.

I did email them and it does not seem like something they will add this any time soon. They did say that they may add sales rank per category sometime in the future, which would be cool for the users.

lilithfair33

I’m a novice at all of this but have been exploring AMAZON Affiliate ideas. Because I really have no idea in what I’m doing since I’m in the hardcore research phase, do you think it would be wise for me to invest in one of those ready made AMAZON Affiliate turnkey sites to start our? I see services out there for them so I was considering it. What do you think?

http://dumbpassiveincome.com/ Matthew Allen

I’m not exactly sure what you’re talking about. Buying sites is always an option – but I don’t know what you’re referring to as far as “turnkey” sites. Rule of thumb – if it sounds too good to be true, it is. You can always buy sites that are already earning, but you’ll pay between 10x and 20x monthly earnings. Also, I would NOT buy a website if I didn’t already know all the inner workings of what makes a website work and earn money. In other words, I would learn all about them by building a few of my own first – and then consider buying after you know what you are doing.

I’m starting up a public case study right now – Niche Site at Night – where I plan to reveal everything I know about building a niche website. And it will be monetized primarily through Amazon.

lilithfair33

What I mean by turnkey is, there are website services out there who specialize in ready made sites that are ready to go and all you have to do is purchase one. I’m not talking about ppl who had a site up and running and now are looking to sell it, I’m referring to services who you buy a website package and they put it up for you with little to no effort on your part to start making money. For instance, I found a website travel affiliate service called http://www.travelerrr.com last night where they’re offering their custom travel affiliate sites, ready for you to buy and start making money. They claim that other than marketing it to get the word out, they help with SEO, social media profiles etc when you buy one of their ready made packages. I was considering trying it out but I can’t find really any reviews on them and I’ve seen where curious ppl have started several forums asking if they’re legit or not and in response, all I see are the same individuals visiting these various forums (who obviously work for the company), responding to those looking for answers and touting how great travelerrr.com is and it’s a great money making opportunity. This makes me very weary but the their company site looks very professional:-/

http://dumbpassiveincome.com/ Matthew Allen

Based on what you’re telling me – that is absolutely too good to be true. I wouldn’t buy one of those. Sites that don’t make any money are literally worthless. You’ll be far better off learning to build one from scratch. Keep up with my case study. I’ll show you how I do it.

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Matthew Allen is a full time trucker - part time blogger and imaginary entrepreneur. He is the only known trucker who is blogging about creating passive income online. Keep up to date by following Matt on the Twitter or circle him on Google +Learn more...